I’m not languishing, I’m dormant - Austin Kleon

Sometimes you might let something drag on too long: you miss deadlines or opportunities; you realize you’ve fallen behind on your vision; you imagined you were Lin-Manuel Miranda slowly cultivating a masterpiece, but then one day realize you’ve actually just been procrastinating. It’s tempting to react to these periods of depressed productivity by

“Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no bir

It’s no coincidence that we keep grappling with the language for how to cultivate a good and productive life (witness the successive manias for wellness in the form of hygge, Marie Kondo, tech, freedom from tech). We all struggle daily with the balance of work and play. Both are essential to a life full of meaning. Fallow time, when practiced the r

I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in: still, rhythmic work with the hands, the kind of light concentration that allows you to dream, and the sense of a kindness done in the process.